We're all well-known with dinosaurs from movies such as Jurassic Park and King Kong, but how much do you actually know about dinosaurs? Here are 10 facts about dinosaurs which you can astonish your friends and family with:

1. Dinosaurs first appeared during the Triassic period (248 to 213 million years back), and were the dominant land animals through the complete Jurassic period, and to the end of the Cretaceous period (65 million years back).

2. We recognize about dinosaurs because fossils have been found. The fossils, which are usually found in sedimentary rocks, including fossilized body parts (bones, teeth, skin, claws, etc.), as well as trace fossils ("ichnofossils") which show how the animals lived, which comprise footprints, burrows, nests, toothmarks, dung, etc.

3. The earth's continents gradually move through a process known as plate tectonics. When dinosaurs first appeared through the Triassic period, all the earth's continents were joined jointly in one super-continent known as Pangea.
4. All the recognizable types of dinosaurs, died off at the end of the Cretaceous period. There are a lot of different theories why this may have happened, but today the most accepted theory is that an asteriod hit the earth, blocking out the sunlight so that there was not sufficient food available. Evidence for this theory is a layer of iridium, which is believed to have come from the asteroid, has been found around the world, and a probable collision site found in southern Mexico.

5. The smallest known dinosaur is Compsognathus, which lived in Europe during the belatedly Jurassic, and was about the size of a chicken. Compsognathus is believed to have eaten insects, lizards and other little animals.

6. There are quite a few candidates for the biggest dinosaur, as there are numerous types of dinosaur that were over 100 feet (30 metres) long. The largest was surely some kind of sauropod (a four-legged plant-eating dinosaur with a long neck) that lived during the late Jurassic or untimely Cretaceous period.

7. The word dinosaur was coined by Sir Richard Owen, who also found the Natural History Museum in London, England. Dinosaur means awful lizard, and is based on the Greek words deinos (awful) and sauros (lizard).

8. People have been verdict dinosaur fossils for hundreds of years, but didn't know what they were until quite lately. The first time that a dinosaur was methodically described was in 1824, by William Buckland.

9. At the same time that dinosaurs conquered the land, there were many aquatic reptiles that dominated the seas, although these were not dinosaurs. These marine reptiles included plesiosaurs, nothosaurs, mosasaurs and ichythosaurs.

10. Even though birds seem to have evolved from dinosaurs, no non-avian flying dinosaurs are known. However, at the time of dinosaurs there were a lot of flying reptiles, known as pterosaurs.  articlerich